Flip flops is the American version of what we call thongs. We went googling to look for an image of thongs and got the American version which wasn’t really appropriate for this blog. eeek. Flip flop is what the council seems to be doing.

We had a very good chat with Metricon’s Operations Manager, Cameron on site today to discuss what options we have to progress Our Nolan. During our chat Cameron mentioned he got an email this morning from the council stating they are now amenable to allowing the house move closer to the neighbour on the south side. This would allow us to move the house further away from the pipe and the implied easement. If this can be done, then this is great news!!! This would be the best option to keep our design largely intact. As our garage wall is already right on the fence line, in order to make this solution work we suggested to Metricon that we were happy to move the garage into the entrance hallway (the entrance is huge) rather than lose any width to the garage.

The council has put a condition on this approach by stating that they would turn the implied easement into a prescriptive easement. We will need to look into what this implies, but we suspect the implications would be similar. An easement is an easement. Or is it? If anyone knows the difference and in particular the legal implications, please feel free to let us know.

It was really good to chat with Cameron and he spent some time to explain the situation and what has been happening. The council want to resolve this issue by the end of the week so we are now looking forward to seeing the revised plans from Metricon soon. We just hope the council doesn’t change their minds and flip flop again.

Yesterday we were informed by our Customer Service Manager, Nick via email that the council has rejected the Metricon proposal to move the retaining wall to deal with the underwater pipe that is on our block.

Since end of May/early June, Metricon have worked on a revised engineering plan and on Wednesday they met with the council – we were hopeful of a positive outcome but that was dashed yesterday.

We would have liked to speak to Nick about the outcome and options moving forward yesterday (we were dissapointed we didn’t get a phone call with the news in person). From the email the council stated:

Based on my calculations from all the drawings the placement of the retaining wall will impact on the existing Council asset.

I have also confirmed that the location of the dwelling cannot be moved further south which also makes things more difficult.

As we have previously discussed there is no easement on the property, however implied easements rights now come into place in this situation.

The issue with the pipe has been very frustrating on a number of fronts. The council didn’t provide any notice of the pipe to Metricon when the builder originally requested the documentation. As a result the plans and design were based on information of not having the pipe. It has also been very frustating to take so long to produce the revised engineering plans.

The problem of the pipe and implied easement is the principle issue which to an extent is out of our control, the second issue, which is more in our (or Metricon’s) control is the process of how it has being resolved and how long it has taken. We will now go through the weekend very irritated and sad that our dream home is nowhere near starting. The whole process is very draining (pardon the pun).

By the numbers, as of today it has been:

271 days (9 months) since we signed to commence the preliminary works with Metricon.

128 days (4 months) since we signed the final contract with Metricon.

72 days (10 weeks) since stopping site scrape works.

46 days for Metricon to produce the revised retaining wall engineering plans.

2 days for the council to reject the revised retaining wall engineering plans.

Countless days of dissapointment and frustration with the process of resolving the issue.

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